Little Joe.
Once upon a time there lived a little boy named Joe. If you want to know his full name, it was Joseph Barnes. He lived when very young in a city in Ontario, but times were not prosperous, and the Barnes family decided to immigrate, as thousands of others were doing, to the great North West. In those days travelling to Manitoba was not what it is now, it was a long and difficult journey. Joe and his parents, the five younger children, and another family, even more numerous, started off together, and after a long and weary trip by train through the United States, they landed at a small town in Manitoba. Here each family bought ox, and yoking them together to a wagon, they made the best of their way across the wide prairie which lay before them.
I am sure many of the boys who read this story would have loved to accompany them. The sky was so blue, the air so clear, the short prairie grass so full of beautiful flowers! Then at dinner time there was the long rest while the patient oxen took their dinner off the sweet grass; and at night a bonfire must be, made, and the family camp around it.
Sometimes they came to a creek, hard to ford, and everything must be taken out of the wagon, and carried across; so, as you may think, it was a slow journey. But evert slow journeys come to an end, and in due time Mr. Barnes and his family, and Mr. Forbes and his family reached their new home. It was a lovely spot. The prairie was not perfectly flat, as it had been when they first set out, but in gently rolling hills and valleys, with now and then a pretty, murmuring brook, and a large wood formed a good background to the scene.
Not many years before, those woods and that peaceful prairie had been the hunting ground of the wild Indian. There he had pitched his little Wigwam, and there he had shot the deer and fox, the wolf and the rabbit. He had wandered from place to place, and as he left each camping ground, he planted in the earth a stick, and tied to it was a rag, or small piece of skin. Joe and his companions often came upon these mementoes of the past, and much they wondered what they meant, but they soon found out that the Indian feared to leave a place without making an offering, be it ever so small, to the “Great Spirit.” Poor benighted heathen, how dark are their minds, how little do they know that the great God whose favor they seek to obtain is looking upon them with love and pity, He is not desiring to get presents from them, but has Himself given for their sakes the greatest of all gifts, His only and well-beloved Son. Dear children, living in a so-called Christian country, do von know this, and do you believe it?
ML 05/06/1906